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What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?

LAST STAND? A newspaper kiosk on Broad Street.Credit
Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

On a recent trip into Philadelphia, after I exited the Interstate and coasted to a stop at the first traffic light, a man walked up to my car. He wore a black apron with a change pouch and held aloft a copy of The Philadelphia Daily News, the city’s tart, irreverent tabloid. It gave me a warm feeling. Of course it did! I’m a newspaper guy. I worked as a reporter for The Daily News in the 1980s, and later for what we called “big sister,” the sober, broadsheet Philadelphia Inquirer. Even in better times, I would have been happy to see the product being hawked, but these days any small sign of life in the newspaper industry, even just the sight of someone reading a paper, feels positively uplifting. I handed over 75 cents for my Daily News, then drove on toward the center of the city — and U.S. Bankruptcy Court, where a hearing was soon to begin, part of an ongoing process that will determine the fate of the city’s newspapers.

Philadelphia is, of course, the city of Ben Franklin, a printer by trade who published The Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper, as well as Poor Richard’s Almanac. It is where the Founding Fathers drafted the nation’s most important documents — the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Word of the Declaration went out to the people on July 6, 1776, when it was published in the pages of The Pennsylvania Evening Post. By the early 20th century, the raucous, elbows-out era of American newspapering, there were 10 daily papers in the city. Now down to a besieged two, Philadelphia is a particularly good place to observe what appears to be big-city journalism’s last stand, when many of America’s metropolitan newspapers must quickly figure out how to become profitable again or face likely extinction.

The stakes extend in many directions. Newspapers remain the primary source of news-gathering in America. And unlike so many Internet “sites,” they are firmly grounded in a geographical place. To read a newspaper is to know what town you’re in. As a young reporter, I covered the trial of a well-known Philadelphia mobster, Harry (the Hunchback) Riccobene, who had been tried, convicted and incarcerated numerous times previously. I approached him during a break on the trial’s first day and asked if he was nervous. He wasn’t. “What’s the expression?” he said to me. “My record speaks for itself.” I was pretty proud when that made it into print. I felt as if I’d shared a joke with a whole city, one that I knew appreciated that kind of wiseguy humor.

No one would say that the history of journalism in America is one of unremitting excellence. Plenty of smaller communities, and some big cities, have never been blessed with anything better than lackluster newspapers. Certainly The Inquirer and The Daily News, when owned by Walter Annenberg, Philadelphia’s postwar press baron, were undistinguished, in no small part because they were subject to Annenberg’s political and personal pique. (He was said to have a blacklist of names that could not appear in print, an eclectic group that included Ralph Nader, Imogene Coca and Zsa Zsa Gabor, as well as the city’s N.B.A. franchise, when it went uncovered for a season because Annenberg had a beef with its owner.)

Annenberg’s sale of The Inquirer and The Daily News in 1969 to the Knight newspaper chain (which later became Knight Ridder) had the effect of elevating the journalism. The Inquirer established a formidable reputation by winning 17 Pulitzer Prizes between 1975 and 1990, a total second only to that of The New York Times in that period. It is certainly less ambitious now than in its peak years, when it sent reporters to cover every big national story and maintained a half-dozen foreign bureaus, but it remains a force in its region and capable of the kind of “watchdog” journalism essential in cities like Philadelphia, which seem to breed corrupt politicians. The Daily News, with a reduced staff that covers fewer stories, remains aggressive, and its distinctive voice is taken seriously in the city’s corridors of power.

But the journalistic worthiness of the two newspapers has not protected them. And what was seen as a possible salvation in 2006, the purchase of the newspapers by Philadelphians with deep roots in the city (the first local investors since Annenberg), has, to this point, produced only a ghastly hemorrhage of money. The new owners put up $150 million of their own. Before filing for bankruptcy, they stopped payment on $400 million in debt. They have not, however, given up, and are locked in a standoff with lenders that Brian Tierney, the leader of the ownership group, has framed as a battle to preserve quality journalism in Philadelphia.

Tierney is the central figure in Philadelphia’s newspaper drama today — an imperfect, improbable savior who in his previous role as the city’s most prominent public-relations executive was hyperaggressive, and often bullying, in his interactions with reporters. No one would compare him with Franklin, except perhaps in his self-confidence. But he has taken to newspapering with a convert’s devotion. In one of our conversations, he had to stop talking for a moment as tears came rolling down his cheeks. He was telling me about a speech he gave to an adult-education group, a routine appearance until the moderator asked everyone to join hands and pray for The Inquirer and The Daily News. “It was unbelievable they would say a prayer for us,” Tierney said as he reached under his glasses to dry his eyes. “But they care. You know, it’s not like we’re some radio station thinking about switching from Top 40 to a salsa format. This is the people’s work, a public trust.”

Bankruptcy proceedings in which the parties do not amicably come together on terms for restructuring debt are fluid and unpredictable. The Philadelphia newspaper case has been particularly rancorous. A possibility exists, probably remote at this point, that the papers could just fold, making Philadelphia the winner of a dubious sweepstakes: first major American city to be left without a daily newspaper. Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Knight Foundation, which finances journalistic innovation, told me, “It’s going to happen somewhere.”

What you notice first about Tierney is his stocky, strong-looking build and the restless physical energy he gives off, as if he’s always an instant away from rushing the line and tackling a quarterback. Now 52, he grew up in Philadelphia’s blue-collar suburbs but was educated at its elite schools, Episcopal Academy on the Main Line followed by the University of Pennsylvania. His father drove a cab before starting a window-glass company; his mother worked as a hatcheck attendant. Short on money to run the newspapers, Tierney sometimes seems as if he’s trying to post Philly street cred as collateral. In a city where some old-timers still identify their neighborhoods by the Catholic parishes they live in, he makes a point of saying that after work on most nights he drives back to the suburbs on a route that takes him past “Roman and Hallahan” — Roman Catholic and John W. Hallahan, the high schools his father and mother attended.

He has taken his public relations mind-set to newspapering. He says he thinks the industry shares too much bad news about itself — “The audience for TV news is tanking, but do you ever hear them talk about that?” — and he was an early advocate for the idea that newspapers ought to begin charging for online content, a notion that has recently gained momentum. He can be a loose cannon. Testifying before Congress in April, he attempted a strained metaphor that involved a “dance club” charging high prices for beer but not paying its dancers, or what might be termed the content providers. “Was that example in reference to a gentlemen’s club?” Representative John Conyers asked. “That’s the kind of club I meant, sir,” he responded.

In bankruptcy court that morning, during an interminable recess, the door in the back of the courtroom kept swinging open as Tierney blew in and out, moving between his lawyers, a group of Teamsters-affiliated newspaper truck drivers who came to support him and the print and radio reporters there to cover the hearing. At one point, he shared a confidence with reporters — “This is off the record, guys,” he said — then returned 20 minutes later and repeated the same thing, just about word for word, on the record.

Like many East Coast and Rust Belt cities, Philadelphia has long had what is sometimes referred to as a challenging union environment. At the newspapers, the Teamsters, whom I remember as physically imposing, tended to call the shots for all the unions, but the passage of time and the onset of job insecurity has mellowed them. On the sidewalk outside the courtroom, a half-dozen drivers, graying and grandfatherly, held signs that said, “Teamsters for Tierney.”

Inside, Jim Phelan, a Daily News driver for 50 years, chatted with Bob Warner, who has had a long career as an investigative reporter at The Daily News. “You remember that Dexter column?” Phelan asked Warner, recalling a long-ago column by Pete Dexter, now a novelist, involving some high jinks with a lynx in a suitcase. Warner brought up an article by Bill Conlin about a hilariously profane tirade by the baseball manager Dallas Green. The two of them kept one-upping each other with their favorite stories. It felt like a wake, except that the loved one was still on life support.

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Credit
Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

Tierney’s ownership group, Philadelphia Media Holdings, purchased the Philadelphia newspapers, along with their joint Web site, Philly.com, for $515 million. The papers had basically been orphaned by the McClatchy chain, which, after buying Knight Ridder, announced plans to immediately unload the chain’s least profitable papers, including the two in Philadelphia. Tierney told me that under his ownership, The Inquirer and The Daily News have been operating at a profit if you exclude the debt obligations. That sounds almost comical, like a homeowner saying his household finances are in terrific shape except for the mortgage he can’t pay, but it holds out the promise that print journalism without excessive debt, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, may be a sustainable, if not an overly lucrative, business.

Tierney and his partners want to invest additional money and emerge from bankruptcy in financial control of the newspapers — in essence, they hope to buy them again, but this time for about $36 million in addition to the newspaper building and other considerations. Meanwhile, the papers’ fortunes diminish with each passing month. The Daily News’s circulation has fallen below 100,000, down from a peak in the early 1980s of nearly 300,000, and reporters in its cavernous newsroom work amid rows of empty desks. The Inquirer still employs more than 300 journalists, a substantial number in this era but about half of what it once had. In the six months ending in April, its daily circulation fell to 288,000 — from 545,000 in 1983 and 352,000 as recently as 2007. Advertising revenue in the last year has dropped precipitously.

Before their industry went into free fall, most Philadelphia journalists would have been apoplectic at the thought of working for Tierney. He was enmeshed in local politics, contributing money to Republican candidates and running campaigns. In the late 1990s, he successfully fought to keep an investigative article involving his best-known client, the local Catholic archdiocese, out of The Inquirer. The reporter on the story ended up filing a defamation suit against his own newspaper and settling out of court. It was a fiasco for the newspaper, and Tierney was in the middle of it. At Philadelphia Media Holdings, Tierney accepted a pay raise and a $350,000 bonus right before the bankruptcy filing — and after employees agreed to give up their own paltry union raises.

It is a sign of the times that most of those at the newspapers seem to accept and even embrace Tierney, preferring him to Knight Ridder in its last years of ownership; to the bankers they still might work for; and certainly to the prospect of the whole enterprise going belly up. It doesn’t hurt that journalists are wired to enjoy a good show and that Tierney provides one. A couple of months ago, he staged a big barbecue in the papers’ back lot and put out an advertising-packed special section to celebrate The Inquirer’s 180th anniversary — a less-obvious milestone than, say, a 175th or 200th anniversary. “He’s like our P. T. Barnum,” Craig McCoy, one of The Inquirer’s most respected reporters, told me.

Tierney gave a tour to Annenberg’s widow, Leonore, not long after taking over the newspapers. They sat in her husband’s old office, now Tierney’s, on North Broad Street, looking out over the city skyline. “Walter had nicer furniture,” she told him. He also had a more favorable business climate, operating long before Internet powerhouses like Craigslist began to gobble up revenue from classified ads.

It was an article of faith among this generation of newspaper publishers that once they finally “got” the Web and built dynamic, advertising-friendly Web sites, they would prosper. But display advertising never migrated in hoped-for numbers to newspaper Web sites. Then the recession hit, and what had already been disappointing growth in online revenue stopped. For the 12-month period ending in June, the Philadelphia newspapers attracted $12.9 million in online revenue, down from $17.3 million in the same period a year previously.

There is every reason to believe that the big, grab-bag metro daily that mixes its news in with comics, advice columns, obituaries and recipes, and undertakes an expensive manufacturing and delivery operation each day to put the product on the street, will pass into history. Among the problems faced by Tierney and other publishers is that many of the big thinkers on the periphery of their industry — academics, Web entrepreneurs, former journalists with the wisdom of hindsight — have already moved on. They’re done with paper, ink, trucks, fuel, the whole era.

This drumbeat, a relentless declaration that print is doomed, may be a problem in and of itself, making it easy to cast anyone who wants to save print as a Luddite. In a widely read essay earlier this year, Clay Shirky, a professor at N.Y.U. and an Internet consultant, suggested embracing the current moment of flux. “That is what real revolutions are like,” he wrote. “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. . . . When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place.”

But parts of the system are actually not broken at all. Journalists still know how to gather news. And the Internet is a step forward in disseminating it. What’s broken is the pipeline that sends money back to where the content is created. Most of it is available to readers online, free, including on newspapers’ own Web sites, where it is not sufficiently supported by advertising.

Newspaper Web sites do draw traffic (“eyeballs”). In April, when the beloved voice of the Philadelphia Phillies, Harry Kalas, collapsed in the broadcast booth and died just before an afternoon game, Philly.com quickly put up a comprehensive package, including a photo gallery, articles from the archives and a space for readers to write in their memories. The site got 3.8 million page views that day, nearly double its average. “The Web is a big part of us being the dominant news source in the region,” Tierney told me. “We want it to be what people turn to for breaking news, or to celebrate a big event or to share their sorrow. And that’s already happening.”

He is under no illusion, though, that the Web site will come close any time soon to supporting the news-gathering of the 400 journalists he employs. For that, he has the print editions. (The joint Web site for The Inquirer and The Daily News accounts for just 6.5 percent of the company’s advertising revenue, a little below the industry average. On it own, it would support a fraction of the current staff, maybe just a few dozen journalists.) Tierney has ordered a stop to the practice of putting exclusive Inquirer and Daily News articles up on Philly.com the night before their publication in print. This extends even to reviews. “Are we going to get beat on a restaurant review?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

As soon as possible, he wants to begin charging for online content. As he told me this, he banged a bagel on a conference table, which sounded like a rock as it hit. “You hear that?” This bagel stinks, he said. “It’s got the same consistency inside and out, but if you went down to our cafeteria, it costs like $1.25. That’s what people pay for stuff like this, so you mean to tell me I can’t get them to pay that for online access to all the incredible stuff in The Inquirer and Daily News online? People who say that all this content wants to be free aren’t paying talented people to create it.”

In an industry currently marinating in self-doubt, Tierney has the appeal of clarity. He may not ultimately be right, but he’s emphatic. Nothing, in his mind, is in place to match the still-powerful newspaper engines. Certainly not television and radio, whose news operations in Philadelphia, as in most cities, largely piggyback on the newspapers. And not blogs or the nascent foundation-supported journalism springing up in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

“We do the brawny work,” Tierney said, sounding like the C.E.O. of some smokestack industry. “The Web efforts, they add something. I congratulate them. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But if somebody thinks in any short term, or even medium term, that the answers are those things, they’re kidding themselves. I know I sound like a heretic in that I won’t come out and say, ‘They’re the future.’ But they’re not. The brawny work is what we’re doing, and the brawny vehicle to carry it is the printed product.”

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VILLAIN TO HERO? Tierney used to spar with the papers he now champions.Credit
Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

I met with Alberto Ibargüen, the Knight Foundation president, at the Newseum in Washington, where he serves as chairman — and where every day, at street level, a sampling of front pages from around the nation is displayed. I looked at them on my way in, and even some of the names sounded like relics from another era: The Elkhart Truth; The Santa Fe New Mexican; The Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

Knight has endowed journalism professorships at universities around the nation, and the health of newspapers has long been a focus of its philanthropy. But as Ibargüen explained it, that has changed — the foundation now seeks to preserve news and information, as distinct from saving newspapers. Knight has been a primary source of financing for MinnPost.com, in Minneapolis, and the Voice of San Diego, the two most advanced Web-only local news operations. It recently gave a grant to Spot.us, a nonprofit start-up that invites citizens to decide what investigative stories are worthy of its financial support — a concept that seems almost designed to send a shiver up the spine of traditional journalists. “Why should an editor have all the fun on deciding what writers are going to do?” Ibargüen said. “This invites journalists to pitch their stories on a Web site and have citizens decide what’s valuable to them. . . . They might say, ‘Here’s $3,000 to do an investigation of the school superintendent.’ ”

Ibargüen and others involved in the invention of new-age journalism speak a language I’ve never heard in newsrooms. When I met with Jan Schaffer, director of the Knight-financed J-Lab at American University (and formerly the business editor at The Inquirer), she referred repeatedly to “the media ecosystem.” She said that “news is a process, not a product” and talked of “big-J journalists,” those at newspapers and other traditional outlets, and “little-j journalists,” citizens who create their own journalism. She said that one of her favorite new outlets is a Web site covering suburban Chappaqua, adding that it was “run by three stay-at-home moms.”

Many working journalists in the country regularly check a Web site known to most as “Romenesko” (after its creator, Jim Romenesko), which aggregates industry news and these days consists mainly of layoffs and other dire news. It can be excruciating to read. Just this year, The Rocky Mountain News perished. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became a Web-only publication with a tiny staff. Detroit’s daily newspapers are now delivered just three days a week. The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Company, and The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst, each went through near-death experiences as their owners won labor concessions after threatening to shutter the papers.

Smaller newspapers, those with circulations under 50,000, are considered the healthiest part of the industry. “They’re not making 30 percent profit margins like they once did, but most of them are doing fine,” John Morton, a newspaper analyst who has followed the industry for decades, told me. Most analysts predict that the papers with a national profile and brand — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today — will find a way to survive and stay in print. (It must be noted that few can say exactly how this will happen.)

The most endangered segment is the one occupied by The Inquirer and other big metro papers that once dominated their regions, in some cases had national and even international reach but now struggle to fully staff bureaus in their state capitals. Among those currently in bankruptcy are the papers that are a part of the vast Tribune Company, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant. What the bankrupt and most at-risk papers have in common is that they recently changed hands and the new owners took on debt — immense debt, in the case of the Tribune Company, which listed obligations of $13 billion when it filed for bankruptcy in 2008.

The newspapers that emerge from bankruptcy should have a better chance at survival, but they’ll be different. “Bear in mind that there will be an economic recovery at some point,” Morton said. “But I suspect the big metros have lost a substantial amount of their advertising forever. When they return to profitability, it will be at a lower level, and the papers will be diminished in size and journalism.”

Much of what will be sorted out in the coming years is the extent to which news will continue to be produced by professional journalists. In May, I attended a meeting of the Knight-sponsored “Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy,” an impressive group led by the former United States solicitor general Ted Olson and Marissa Mayer, an executive at Google. Much of the conversation was abstract and airy, but even within that, a kind of clash in worldviews was apparent. One commission member, Danah Boyd, a blogger and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, expressed her admiration for “journalism by the public, for the public.” She advocated for the need to have universal high-speed access for young people who blur the lines of art, research and news and “like to mash it up and mix it up” — and spoke with passion about how on her way to the airport in Boston she learned more from her Twitter feeds about a traffic backup than from the local all-news radio.

John Carroll, a fellow panelist and a lion of the traditional news business — he edited The Baltimore Sun and The Los Angeles Times — seemed to shift impatiently through much of the all-day meeting. When he spoke, he apologized for not seeming to be sufficiently forward-looking. He said the country needed “a national base line of originally reported news . . . the kind of news produced by professional reporters.” Just to be clear, he added, “By reporters, I mean people who go out and dig stuff up.”

In January, the Knight Foundation awarded a $200,000 grant to The Philadelphia Public School Notebook. Its editor, Paul Socolar, may be something like the journalist of the future. He is earnest, dedicated to a cause, foundation-financed and, to this point, read by a narrow audience. I accompanied him to a press briefing for the rollout of the Philadelphia school district’s $3.2 billion budget. He quickly imbibed a thick handout filled with charts and long columns of numbers and jotted down questions, which seemed a bit sharper and harder to answer than those asked by the reporters from the city’s two dailies.

The Notebook actually started publishing in 1994, and Socolar, who had two children in the public schools, became its editor five years later. During his tenure, Socolar told me, The Public School Notebook refined its mission: its editors and contributors still consider themselves advocates for change, he said, “but it became equally clear to us that we have to do reporting, have journalistic standards and publish real news stories.”

It has largely achieved that. The Notebook, a five-times-a-year print publication, breaks stories and is notably well written. The grant was to improve its Web site and, as Socolar put it, start a “two-way conversation” with readers. But a broad audience and impact, two goals of traditional journalism, have been hard to attain. Socolar acknowledged that The Notebook’s core readers are insiders — principals, teachers, district administrators and highly engaged parents. “There is a jolt you can get out of an Inquirer story that I know we don’t,” Socolar said.

The new money helped energize The Notebook’s Web site, but it will take time before it generates more traffic and hosts a dynamic dialogue. “It’s still pretty modest,” Socolar said. “About 400 visitors a day — 500 or 600 on really good days. And some of those folks are stumbling upon it because they’re looking for the movie ‘The Notebook.’ ”

In Philadelphia, the Knight Foundation has also supported the Web site Plan Philly, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania that reports on planning and zoning at a level of detail never approached by the city’s newspapers, as well as the city’s version of EveryBlock.org, a “hyperlocal” that provides microscopic, data-driven information on segments of the city — home sales, crime, health-code violations at restaurants and so forth. A proliferation of blogs and Web sites cover the arts, sports and food scenes in Philadelphia. A Web site called the Media Mobilizing Project, also underwritten by the Knight Foundation, seeks out the stories of immigrants and other minorities, which newspapers, even at their best, rarely did a good job of telling.

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SECOND EDITION Marimow, a Pulitzer winner as a reporter, was brought back to edit The Inquirer.Credit
Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

One of Tierney’s first moves was to hire Bill Marimow, a two-time Pulitzer winner when he was an Inquirer reporter, as the paper’s top editor. Marimow, who is 62, had moved on to Baltimore, where he edited The Sun, then to Washington to serve as managing editor for news at National Public Radio. His return to Philadelphia amounted to a doubling down on labor-intensive, expensive-to-produce, hard-news journalism. It’s not at all clear there’s a business plan in that, but if The Inquirer goes down, it will do so with guns blazing.

In March, Vince Fumo, a longtime state senator from South Philly and power broker in the state capital, was convicted in federal court in a massive public corruption scheme. The main charge involved millions of dollars given to a nonprofit he controlled from donors who sought to remain hidden, including PECO Energy, a state-regulated electric utility that secretly contributed a whopping $17 million. It was Inquirer reporters who first uncovered the conspiracy and identified the sources of the money, and the federal prosecutor, in his closing argument to the jury, took the unusual step of crediting them. “It only stopped for one reason,” Robert Zauzmer, an assistant U.S. attorney, said. “It stopped for the same reason that everything else stops in this case. The publicity starts in The Philadelphia Inquirer . . . and that was the end of the scheme.”

The crisis in newspapers is sometimes framed as something that matters mainly to journalists, but it is of course more than that. My conversations in Philadelphia showed a concern far beyond the newsrooms. I asked Zauzmer if he had in mind the papers’ imperiled status when he addressed the jury. “I did, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do it,” he said, adding that he would not have done so if there was not also a strategic reason for crediting The Inquirer. The publicity caused Fumo to try to cover his tracks, he said, and those actions figured into some of the criminal charges. (“The Inquirer will go absolutely BALLISTIC if they ever really find out,” Fumo, urging associates to withhold information, wrote in one e-mail message that came out at trial.)

Marimow called my attention to some recent investigative triumphs — a story on a C.E.O. who stole a half-million dollars from his charter school, was charged criminally and had just pleaded guilty; another on a large number of city employees who failed to pay their property taxes. As we talked, he showed me letters and printed-out e-mail from readers responding to emotionally resonant stories. He called them “the irrefutable evidence of the beauty, the importance and the significance of the newspaper.”

One letter was in response to an article about a longtime supermarket employee who was fired after he forgot his reading glasses one day and took a pair from a shelf to do inventory. “I want to thank you for your article on Bob Martucci,” a reader wrote. “Thank God for the press.” Another letter came after an article on the funeral of a slain police officer who was buried with a sonogram of his unborn child. “I sat in a park in midmorning with a Wawa coffee and the paper,” it said. “Within minutes I had tears slowly running down my cheeks.”

With The Inquirer and The Daily News teetering, many in the city have hoped that the Pew Charitable Trusts would emerge as a white knight. Founded with money from the Sun Oil fortune, Pew is Philadelphia-based and prominent, nationally, in studying, supporting and in various ways participating in the media. Pew’s managing director for information initiatives, Donald Kimelman, spent two decades at The Inquirer, including four years as its Moscow correspondent. He told me that the Pew did, indeed, look seriously at giving financial backing to a Web-only news operation in Philadelphia but decided against it for a reason that should catch the attention of anyone hoping that foundations are the future of muscular news-gathering: It did not want to give birth to a long-term money drain.

The foundation commissioned a study three years ago, when the Philadelphia papers were passing out of Knight Ridder’s control and some prospective buyers seemed likely to make drastic cuts. “Everyone was thinking of the worst-case scenario,” Kimelman said, “and we had to ask ourselves, ‘Is there a role for us to play?’ ”

The news site was to be seeded with nonprofit funds but with a goal that it could eventually subsist on advertising revenue. Kimelman concluded that the projections were too optimistic to support even the 30 or so journalists envisioned — and that was before the market for online advertising tanked. “We didn’t want to be in it for two or three years,” he said, “and then instead of the for-profit publisher laying people off, we’d be the nonprofit doing layoffs.”

The other reason the plan died was that Brian Tierney and his local partners — the largest is Bruce Toll, a founder of the home builder Toll Brothers — won the bidding for the newspapers. “There was some thought that we should be the heroes,” Kimelman said. “But we were not going to compete with local ownership. When the Tierney group came in, they became the local heroes.”

Tierney and his partners are still operating The Inquirer and The Daily News, but who ultimately owns them is to be determined in bankruptcy court. Some of the banks that initially lent money for the acquisition in 2006 have taken their losses and departed, selling the loans at deep discounts. The owner of the largest share of debt in the newspapers is Angelo, Gordon & Company, a New York firm specializing in “distressed debt.”

That firm is also a player in the Tribune Company bankruptcy; in the management of The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is expected to emerge soon from bankruptcy; and in American Media Company, which publishes The National Enquirer and The Star. A banker at the firm, Bradley Pattelli, is involved in all those properties, making him a highly influential if little-known figure in American newspapers. (I talked to Pattelli twice on the telephone, but he would not speak on the record. At his request I e-mailed him questions, but he did not respond to them.)

The reorganization plan Tierney files in bankruptcy court will offer lenders about $36 million — raised from the initial group as well as some new investors — along with the Inquirer Building, just north of Center City, and its surrounding real estate. The newspapers would either become tenants or move to another location. The lenders will follow with a proposal of their own. They are likely to place a higher financial value on the newspapers, although no one disputes that they are worth far less than the money owed.

Angelo, Gordon, however, appears to want to play a significant role in owning and operating the papers. Tierney contends that the company would quickly close The Daily News and, over time, cut costs in such a way as to decimate The Inquirer. It’s impossible to know. (And, depending on which way the economy turns, Tierney himself, who has already presided over substantial layoffs, could find that he has to make further cuts.)

What is clear is that beyond the hardheaded, dollars-and-sense negotiations, Tierney is making an appeal based partly on emotion. He’s the Philly guy protecting a local resource — and the future of print journalism in a city with a history of, and a continuing need for, great newspapering. Like Marimow, he kept directing me to examples of recent articles, which he had spread out on the table. One was an investigative series on an arcane city agency discovered to be granting huge tax cuts to insiders.

“This isn’t cheap to do,” he said, holding up a newspaper with the big front-page headline, “It’s Who You Know.” “Think about the cost of it — the writing, the editing, even the newsprint. But I’m proud of it. It’s what we’ve got to keep doing. People feel that here. I think even our drivers feel like, We’re not bringing in doughnuts. We’re bringing in The Inquirer and Daily News.”

Correction: August 9, 2009

An article on Page 36 this weekend about the plight of daily newspapers in Philadelphia misspells the name of a company that once owned The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News. It is McClatchy, not McClatchey.

Michael Sokolove is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is “Warrior Girls,” about the injury epidemic in girls’ sports.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page MM36 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: What's a Big City Without a Newspaper. Today's Paper|Subscribe